history-of-sexuality

There has been so much action in the past,_ said D.H. Lawrence, __specially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.

[A]t least since the late nineteenth century when the primary role in categorising sexual behaviour and naming what is __ormal_ and what is __erverse_ passed, in most industrial societies, from the religious to the medical and scientific professions, we have lived with the notion of distinct categories of people labelled __omosexual_ and __eterosexual_. (The category __omosexual_ was coined by the Viennese writer Karol Benkert in 1869, __eterosexual_ emerging somewhat later.) Since that time, new discourses have tried to establish the male __omosexual_ as a distinct type of person - as opposed to same-sex attraction or same-sex acts being seen as a potential in everyone. As Peter Tatchell [__t__ Just a Phase: Why Homosexuality is Doomed_, in Simpson (ed.), Anti-Gay, London: Cassell. 1996] puts it, __rior to that time _ there were only homosexual acts, not homosexual people _ [For] the medieval Catholic Church _ homosexuality was not _ the special sin of a unique class of people but a dangerous temptation to which any mortal might succumb. This doctrine implicitly conceded the attractiveness of same-sex desire, and unwittingly acknowledged its pervasive, universal potential